Alexei Savinov

The holdings of almost every famous international museum have been formed on the basis of private collections. Through the second half of the 19th century – the period in which state museums were “born” – private collections were “dissolved” into larger academic museum exhibitions, a dominant tendency which seemed only natural at the time. Following Russia's 1917 revolution, the tendency was only enhanced, receiving a new and powerful impulse. Private collections were broken up and absorbed by the State Museum Fund; thus, particular collections became an integral parts of others. Even if an individual collection was preserved in its entirety in a museum it was in some way adjusted for the sake of some principle of “higher order”.